Bob Brookmeyer is as forthright, and often unorthodox, in his conversation as he is in his music. Here’s some of what Brookmeyer told The New York Times‘s Ben Ratliff about how jazz soloists often relate to the music he writes:

If you give a soloist an open solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he’s coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, ‘What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?’ And the next 30 seconds is, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll play what I learned last night.’ And bang! Minute 2 is whoever he likes, which is probably Coltrane.

Ratliff’s article, “Bob Brookmeyer: Raging and Composing Against the Jazz Machine,” is in today’s Times. The Rifftides staff recommends it. If it doesn’t give you enough of Brookmeyer’s undiluted opinions about music and life, go to his website, scroll down and click on “Currents.”

Love your blog…
Got it from Kenny Harris* here in Bermuda. I am a tenor and soprano sax player living in Bermuda as Kenny is. Trying to keep flame alive. Damn, there are so many steel pan players here, but I guess that’s what the tourists want.
The real reason I emailed you is response to the baritone sax players. ~~~ great. Just a plug for my old friend, Nick Brignola. Never seemed to get his due, but could also play great tenor and soprano. May he RIP.
Keep up the good work.
George Kezas

*The British drummer Kenny Harris played in New York in the 1950s with Sonny Stitt, Paul Bley and others and appeared at clubs including the Hickory House, Basin Street East and The Embers. He had a memorable encounter in Bermuda with Paul Desmond, recalled in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, pages 248-9. Harris wrote a biography of his teacher and hero Don Lamond, First Call Drummer, out of print but worth seeking. —DR

John Birchard, a firmly committed Washington, DC, jazz listener who moonlights as a Voice of America correspondent, sent this report. The Rifftides staff added links.

I attended a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center’s “K-C Jazz Club” venue – the Baritone Saxophone Band in a Gerry Mulligan tribute. I had been looking forward to the evening for some time and was not disappointed. On the remote possibility you’re not familiar with the group, Ronnie Cuber has rounded up Scott Robinson and Gary Smulyan for a three-bari front line that displays a remarkable variety of sound combinations due to Cuber’s skills as an arranger – gruff and punching here, smooth and crooning there. He also avoids the mistake of routining each tune the same with head followed by horn solo, horn solo, horn solo, bass solo and drum fours, then out. If only more jazz band leaders would give that rote approach some thought, their music would be more stimulating.
Cuber is faithful to the Mulligan concept of a no-piano rhythm section that included Andy McKee on bass and Shingo Okudaira on drums. The set we attended included such Mulligan staples as “Five Brothers”, “Walkin’ Shoes”, “Line for Lyons” and “Theme for Jobim”, all of which had their attractions. The band really took off on an up reading of “Bernie’s Tune”, with Cuber digging in hard in his solo. After the applause died down, he referred to it as “ass-kickin'” music. Later in the set, he departed from the Mulligan book to take one from Art Blakey’s library – Curtis Fuller’s “A La Mode”, which was ‘way up and smokin’.
Robinson and Smulyan are excellent players and accomplished soloists, but clearly the boss is Cuber. Over the years since I first heard him with Maynard Ferguson’s band in the early 60s, he has developed into a mature, gifted musician whose solos display swing, wit, soul, experience and whose ideas are given space to breathe. He’s grayer and larger in the mid-section now than I remembered him, but he still has the stuff that has kept him employed with everyone from Mongo Santamaria to Woody Herman to Steely Dan and the Mingus Big Band. If there’s a better owner/operator of the baritone sax around today, I haven’t heard him/her. Ronnie Cuber is a rightful heir to the Gerry Mulligan/Harry Carney/Pepper Adams legacy.
John Birchard

Cuber, Smulyan and the late Nick Brignola recorded in an earlier three-baritones coalition paying homage to Mulligan.

It seems to me that most people are impressed with just three things: how fast you can play, how high you can play, and how loud you can play. I find this a little exasperating, but I’m a lot more experienced now, and understand that probably less than two percent of the public can really hear. I mean follow a horn player through his ideas, and be able to understand those ideas in relation to the changes.
—Chet Baker

Whether I get adequate attention or not, people here do know the work I have been doing systematically and without compromise for over 40 years. I get tired of people making excuses for guys who don’t continue the art because they can’t make a living.
—Bill Dixon

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been awarded second place in the performing arts category for an IPPY, a 2006 Independent Book Publishers Award.
Here are the finishers:
Winner:
Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press)
Finalists:
Doug Ramsey, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside Publications)
Weathervane Theatre, Nights of Northern Lights:40 Seasons of the Weathervane Theatre
I don’t think that Desmond would have been discouraged about losing to Charles Ives and Duke Ellington. Nor am I. Hearty congratulations to Ms. Perlis, Ms. Van Cleve and Yale. I can’t wait to read their book.

Rifftides reader Bob Walsh writes:

What ever happened to guitarist Mundell Lowe? I saw him often in the studio band of Merv Griffin in New York. I met him at Monterey when he was a fixture in backup groups. He later took over after Monterey impresario Jimmy Lyons’ s forced retirement. I recall that he was married to vocalist Betty Bradley, who vastly improved as a singer after she wed Mundell. As a very young man, he was a guitarist with the Sons of the Pioneers, along with Ohio-born Leonard Sly (later known as Roy Rogers). He fit into any setting but never seemed to have an identifiable style or “voice.” Reminds me that Marian McPartland was passed over many times for Monterey until John Lewis finally concluded she was no longer playing back others’ voices and had found what was distinctively her own.

The last I heard, Mundell Lowe, at eighty-four, was working as much as he cared to. I think the Betty you have in mind is Bennett, who was a terrific singer long before she met Lowe. They live in southern California. Earlier, she was married to Andre Previn and in the early fifties dated Paul Desmond (Take Five, pages 205 and 206). I didn’t know about Lowe’s being with the Sons of the Pioneers, but that doesn’t surprise me. Many fine jazz guitarists are from the Southwest or deep South—Lowe is from Mississippi—and many played country music, among them Jimmy Raney, Herb Ellis, Charlie Christian and Hank Garland, not to overlook the amazing Thumbs Carllile. As for the question of Lowe’s style and voice, he gets by on thorough musicianship, taste, intense swing and the undiluted admiration of his fellow musicians. All of his attributes, plus the lift of his rhythm guitar, are on this CD, a trio with Ray Brown on bass and Previn playing piano.
In case you are skeptical that there is a Thumbs Carllile, go here, scroll down and sample “Me and Memphis.”
Roy Rogers was a good singer, better than Gene Autry. I wish that I still had a 78 rpm record of him singing a song called, I think, “Moaning Low.” It seems to be missing from all of the Rogers CD reissues. Rogers recorded near misses like “Cleanin’ My Rifle (and Thinkin’ of You)” and lightweight novelties (“Gay Ranchero,” “Pistol Packin’ Mama). ” But “Everything Changes,” “Green Green Grass of Home,” “Blue Shadows on the Trail” and his skilled yodeling on “My Little Lady” compensate for a lot of dross. Country music today could use a stiff shot of Rogers’ unpretentious, straightforward approach. This album has generous samples of Rogers from all phases of his career.

You’ve had nearly a month to memorize those old picks, so they’re gone. You’ll find the new Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column.

In jazz histories, as in all histories of human activity, small errors are repeated and become the standard version of events. Don Payne, the bassist on Ornette Coleman’s first album, sent the following addendum to the Rifftides piece on Johnny Mandel’s contribution to a Coleman compositon and the record deal that led to Coleman’s emergence.

We soon did a one a.m. audition at the club. It was attended by John Lewis, Percy Heath, Milt Jackson and Connie Kay–the Modern Jazz Quartet. They brought Les Koenig, the owner of Contemporary Records. On the spot, he signed us, on a handshake, to a two-record deal. I remember Koenig taking Ornette by the arm and saying, “If I don’t get you, Atlantic will.” That first LP, now a classic, was Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman. That is history.

Payne’s account differs significantly from the liner-note version, which says that bassist Red Mitchell suggested to Coleman that he take one of his compositions to Koenig, Coleman demonstrated the tune by playing it on his alto sax and Koenig signed him then. In light of the outcome–Coleman’s fame–does it matter which version is true? Only if you think that accuracy in history is important.
After Coleman’s two Contemporary albums, Atlantic did get him. He made eight albums for Atlantic before moving on to Columbia, then a variety of labels.

Bill Crow did not stop collecting jazz anecdotes when he published Jazz Anecdotes and From Birdland to Broadway. He has a column of anecdotes every month in Allegro, the newspaper of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. With Bill’s permission, here is one that deserves circulation beyond the 802 membership. The Rifftides staff has added links to music by the principals.

Bassist Don Payne, who now lives in Florida, was three years out of the Army in 1958. He moved into a cottage in the Hollywood hills where he and a group of local musicians that called themselves “The Jazz Messiahs” often rehearsed, trying to develop their own sound. Don Cherry, the trumpet player with the group, introduced them to Ornette Coleman, who had written some interesting originals. One day they were working on “The Blessing,” one of Ornette’s tunes. Walter Norris had worked out the harmonies, and they were playing it over and over to memorize it. Suddenly the door opened and Payne’s next door neighbor walked in. After nodding hello, he took a sheet of music paper and quickly wrote down the tune they had been playing, and added an improvement to the chords at the end of the bridge. He reached over Walter’s shoulder and put the music in front of him on the piano, bowed and smiled to the other musicians and went back out the door. Walter played what he had written and said, “This works!” He turned around to say thank you, but the man was already gone. He asked, “Who was that?” Don said, “That’s my neighbor, Johnny Mandel.”

Jazz is a small community, but I would never have imagined a connection between Ornette Coleman and Johnny Mandel.
I called Don Payne this afternoon to fill in a couple of blanks. He said that The Jazz Messiahs was Don Cherry’s group. Don Friedman was the original pianist, replaced by Walter Norris when Friedman moved to New York. James Clay was the tenor saxophonist, Billy Higgins the drummer. After Clay left to join Red Mitchell, Ornette came in on alto saxophone. The quintet’s showcase performance at a Hollywood club led to Coleman’s being offered a record deal. The band eventually went pianoless and became the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Payne left Los Angeles to join guitarist Mundell Lowe, then Ralph Sharon’s trio backing Tony Bennett.
Payne’s memories of the circumstances leading to the emergence of Ornette Coleman are at odds with conventional accounts, which he says perpetuate initial reporting errors that distort history. Eventually, we’ll have more of Payne’s recollections of that yeasty period.

The Trumpet As Metaphor

You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or trust me, you haven’t a chance.—W.S. Gilbert

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. —Norman Mailer

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.—Theodore Hesburgh

Reading, hearing and seeing stories this week about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival triggers memories of the festival’s beginnings and of the years I lived in the Crescent City (please, not The Big Easy). JazzFest, as it was christened at its birth in the late 1960s, began as the purest of jazz festivals, integrated with a judicious smattering of associated events involving Louisiana food and culture. The 1968 and ’69 festivals, along with certain years at Newport and Monterey, were among the music’s milestone large events. They were not big money makers and they did not fit some New Orleans movers’ and shakers’ vision of what a festival should be in a city whose motto is “Let The Good Times Roll.”
From an earlier Rifftides piece about Willis Conover, who produced the 1969 JazzFest:

The ’69 festival turned out to be one of the great events in the history of the music. It reflected Willis’s knowledge, taste, judgment, and the enormous regard the best jazz musicians in the world had for him.
I won’t give you the complete list of talent. Suffice it to report that the house band for the week was Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, and that some of the hundred or so musicians who performed were Sarah Vaughan, the Count Basie band, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Albert Mangelsdorff, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Giuffre, the Onward Brass Band, Rita Reyes, Al Belletto, Eddie Miller, Graham Collier, Earle Warren, Buddy Tate, Dickie Wells, Pete Fountain, Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie. The festival had style, dignity and panache. It was a festival of music, not a carnival. An enormous amount of the credit for that goes to Willis. His achievement came only after months of infighting with the chairman and other retrograde members of the jazz establishment who did not understand or accept mainstream, much less modern, jazz and who wanted the festival to be the mini-Mardi Gras that it became the next year and has remained since.

To read more about Conover’s role in the festival, go here.
In 1970, George Wein’s Festival Productions company took over JazzFest from the locals who created it, renamed it the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and—with promotional skill and canny marketing—made it the world-famous party it is today. The fact that the bash is overwhelmingly pop, secondarily heritage and minimally jazz doesn’t bother the promoters and doesn’t bother New Orleans. It was probably inevitable in the city that care forgot, that JazzFest would become a big, fat, swirling celebration full of R&B, rock, gospel, Zydeco and soul. The headliners this year are Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Herbie Hancock, The Meters, Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Keith Urban and Fats Domino. Perhaps you’ll have no trouble finding the one jazz name in that list.
In the aftermath of Katrina, with much of the city resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival symbolizes New Orleans’ determination to recover. That speaks of a spirit that rises from within New Orleanians and cuts through a malaise of failed leadership, politics and bureaucracy. For eight years, I was a New Orleanian. I understand that spirit. It grows out of the curious combination of laissez faire and obstinance that animates folks whose blood has a component of coffee with chicory.
Partying is wonderful. Food is wonderful. Boogying and getting down is wonderful. Few Orleanians would disagree with any of that. But this is the city that gave us Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Henry “Red” Allen, Barney Bigard, Raymond Burke, Danny Barker, Paul Barbarin, James Black, Johnny Vidacovich, Al Belletto, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and the Marsalises.
Clearly, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is here to stay as a kaleidoscope of entertainment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the city also had room for a festival that honored and nurtured the music that is the living symbol of the New Orleans spirit. Somehow, jazz ended up in a minor role at what the natives still call JazzFest.

Today, favorite blogette DevraDoWrite is celebrating the first anniversary of her web log. Many happy returns.
If you’d like to learn how Devra likes to horse around, go here.

Within a half hour of returning from a trip late this afternoon, I got into the appropriate duds, jumped on the mountain bike and took a twelve-mile ride before supper. The route was a favorite, along one of the irrigation canals carrying the water that allows this high desert valley to bloom. For long stretches, the margins of the path are graced with lilacs, clouds of lilacs, in parks, yards, the borders of orchards, vacant lots. The blossoms range from purest white through pink, lavender, mauve and magenta down to an indigo that approaches black.
The light slanted across the lilacs as the sun lowered toward the peaks of the Cascade range. The scent of the blooms intensified in the evening air and, without having been near a glass of wine, I came home in a state of slight intoxication.

The next few days will find me consorting with friends from educational endeavors long ago; in other words, a college reunion. I leave you with the two items below. The first is brief, a bit of welcome news. The second is long, intended to bring to your attention a musician who deserves it.
I’ll be traveling without benefit or burden of the old laptop. Hey, we all need breaks now and then from the digital world . Without them, we might need digitalis.
Have a good weekend.

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been named a semi-finalist in the performing arts category for an IPPY, a 2006 Indpendent Book Publishers Award.
The competition:
Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington
Calum Waddell, Minds of Fear: A Dialogue With 30 Modern Masters of Horror
Jack Lane, A Gallery of Stars: The Story of the Hollywood Brown Derby’s Wall of Fame
Weathervane Theatre, Nights of Northern Lights:40 Seasons of the Weathervane Theatre
The winner will be announced on May 10.

Here is an excerpt from a much longer piece that will soon appear elsewhere. More about that later.

The trumpeter and sometime guitarist Randy Sandke receives neither the critical nor popular attention that goes to fellow trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas—to pick a couple of names out of the air—but everything about his music says that he should. He is a technical and creative virtuoso on the trumpet. Regardless of the style and era of music he chooses for his projects, he seems unrestricted in interpretive power. He arranges and composes for large and small groups with a canny understanding of dynamics, instrumental textures, relative harmonic densities and the importance of space. A lover of challenges, risks, surprises and humor, Sandke is serious about his music but exhibits no evidence of pomposity, pretentiousness or proprietary airs.
Of a piece called “Berlin” on his Subway Ballet CD (Evening Star), Sandke explains in his literate notes, “I decided to release it on the belief that there just aren’t enough atonal guitar solos in the world, and also it may help dispel (or at least further defy) the persistent notion that I am merely a ‘swing’ musician. (Okay—I worked with Benny Goodman, but so did Fats Navarro and Herbie Hancock and nobody refers to them as ‘swing musicians.’) Being thus labeled is somewhat akin to being called a child molester in that the tag never seems to go away, and both can be equally deleterious to one’s career.”

The new series of Prestige recordings remastered for compact disc by Rudy Van Gelder, the engineer who recorded them, is the occasion for the reappearance of one of Kenny Dorham’s finest albums, Quiet Kenny. The sound was never inadequate on a Van Gelder session, but his rebalancing and adjustment of some of the sonic nuances of the rhythm section etch Dorham’s sound closer to the intimacy the trumpeter achieved in person.

Dorham was of the generation of trumpet players who followed and were indebted to Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike his contemporary the incandescent Fats Navarro, Dorham played journeyman bebop for a few years before his musical personality emerged. In 1948, when he replaced Miles Davis in Charlie Parker’s quintet, he began phasing out the standard bop phrases that dominated his concept. The increased maturity of his harmonic thinking led to greater individuality in the creation of improvised melodic lines. At the same time, his articulation, always a hallmark of his work, took on even more of a speechlike quality. In the mid-fifties, Dorham’s playing with Horace Silver, Cecil Payne and Max Roach established him as one of the most personal voices on any instrument.

Quiet Kenny, from 1960, is an album of masterly Dorham performances. His rhythm section is pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Arthur Taylor. A few months earlier, they accompanied John Coltrane in his watershed “Giant Steps” session. The CD contains Dorham’s compositions “Lotus Blossom,” “Blue Spring Shuffle” and “Blue Friday” in addition to five standard songs. His readings of the melodies of “My Ideal,” “I Had the Craziest Dream” and “Old Folks” “Mack the Knife” conjure up the lyrics almost as surely as if he were singing them. Then, he proceeds to create melodies that sometimes equal or surpass the originals. His compelling “Alone Together” consists of Dorham playing the melody one time, his only improvisation ten seconds of gentle declension at the end. It’s a magical performance.

Dorham never achieved the popular success of Gillespie and Davis, and never a smattering of their financial independence. Throughout his career, he found it necessary to have day jobs to keep his family housed and clothed, moonlighting in a sugar refinery and an airplane factory, occasionally writing record reviews and articles for Down Beat. During one period, he taught at the Lenox School of Jazz. At the time he recorded Quiet Kenny, he was working at Manny’s music store in Manhattan, not teaching trumpet, but on the floor selling instruments. Dorham fell victim to kidney disease in the sixties, but he kept developing, exploring the new freedom that entered jazz with the innovations of Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans and Miles Davis in Kind of Blue and the post-“Giant Steps” Coltrane. He died in 1972.

A new generation of musicians discovered or re-discovered Dorham in the 1990s. Trumpeters as diverse as Ryan Kisor, Nicholas Payton and Byron Stripling have acknowledged his influence not only as an improviser but for his insights into the possibilities in chords. I’m not sure that the Van Gelder remastering of Quiety Kenny justifies replacing previous CD editions of the album, but I hope that it brings Dorham to the attention of listeners unfamiliar with the work of one of the great soloists of the second half of the twentieth century.

The other CDs reissued in the first batch of Prestige’s projected series of remastered Van Gelders are:

Red Garland: Red Garland’s Piano
The Modern Jazz Quartet: Django
Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane
Coleman Hawkins: The Hawk Relaxes
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus
Miles Davis: Relaxin’
John Coltrane: Lush Life
Gene Ammons: Boss Tenor
Eric Dolphy: Out There

There’s not a B + in the bunch. They are all A’s. It will be a challenge for Prestige to match that level of quality in the next release.

The great (adjective used advisedly) photographer William P. Gottlieb died on Sunday at the age of 89. He hadn’t made a photograph with a jazz theme for decades, but that didn’t matter. The ones he shot in the forties and fifties are indelible images. Once you have seen his picture of 52nd Street in the rain, you won’t forget it; nor his shots of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sid Catlett, young Frank Sinatra and valuable, barely-remembered figures like Al Casey and Dave Lambert. For a thorough review of Bill Gottlieb’s work, go to the Library of Congress site devoted to him. It includes a series of sound bites of his reminiscences and an extensive collection of his photographs. This is an instance of the nation preserving and honoring the work of one of its finest visual artists.

I don’t pay much attention to rock and roll revival musicals because I avoid rock and roll, to the limited extent possible in a world saturated with it. Paul Paolicelli is an author, fellow journalist and former jazz trumpeter just enough younger than I to have been a part of the first rock generation. He sent a charming essay concerning the Broadway show called Jersey Boys. I had never heard of it and had to look it up. It is about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I liked Paul’s little story and asked him if I could share it with you. Here it is.

A Question Of Time?
I put the Jersey Boys CD into the deck in my car’s radio. As it happens, another CD I’d loaded earlier that week was a Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane compilation. It made for an interesting juxtaposition and ride to the other side of town.
(I don’t know what gets into these producers’ heads when they do these sorts of things. Within the first five minutes of the Jersey Boys CD I was treated to four letter words in dialogue a couple of times. More to the point, my soon-to-be ten year old in the back seat was also so enlightened. Don’t these people understand that sharing music with your children is part of the fun? Why do they have to put the PG rating on everything?)
But language is, I think, of the essence here. I talked with my daughter about the social relevance of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Tried to explain to her how pervasive and inescapable popular music had been in that time period, my time period, my youth. Told her of how I had been a music student and couldn’t have been less interested in this form of music, yet heard it often. Reminisced about how, in the army, you heard music everyday and, if you were a purist (and a bit of a snob) as I was, it didn’t matter. You heard popular music. And that the truly surprising thing about it was that it now held a certain warm place in memory, a nostalgia that overwhelmed poetical or compositional inadequacies.
I played “Sherry” for my daughter. Asked her what she thought.
“It’s neat,” she said.
Then I played Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane doing “My One and Only Love,” by Robert Mellin and Guy Wood. What did she think?
“It’s okay,” she said, damning it with faint praise.
I wouldn’t let it go. Listen to the lyrics, I said. Listen to the difference in approach, in tone, in complexity. Here…scan these lines:
Sherry, Sherry baby
Sherry, Sherry baby
She – e – e-e-e-e-ry baby
She – e – rry, can you come out tonight
She – e – e-e-e-e-ry baby
She – e – rry, can you come out tonight?
Okay? Now compare those lyrics with these…
The very thought of you makes my heart sing
like an April breeze on the wings of spring.
And you appear in all your splendor,
My one and only love.
Do you see the difference? Can you see why a hopeful musician in my generation would want the sophistication and delicacy of a well crafted lyric? Why we thought popular lyrics and chord structures were silly, immature, superficial.
“What’s splendor?” she asked.
I remember two of the most magnificent teachers I’d ever had, Bass and Helen Hutchinson who ran the Newport Beach Jazz Workshop in which I was privileged to play. Some years later, in an interview, Bass was asked what he had tried to accomplish in working with kids all those years. “Well, it’s really fairly simple,” he said. “We were trying to teach these kids the difference between artistry and noise.”
The difference between artistry and noise.
In my youth, in my arrogance, I was convinced I knew the difference. Now I was trying to pass that wisdom along to my daughter.
So how does that explain the extraordinary success of Jersey Boys on Broadway? Here’s the really funny thing; I’m enjoying the music. Despite my sensitive, overactive, formally educated brain, there’s something in those simplistic lyrics and uncomplicated chords that is downright toe-tapping and head-bouncing. Something that captures the energy and spirit of that generation in a way that literature or graphic arts never did. Something that delves into the dynamics of a generation raised in the contradictions of a childhood in Eisenhower lethargy, a manhood and adulthood in Southeast Asian violence and Reganonomics. There is something in this music that expands beyond its structure. Is it nostalgia? Is it the fundamental human instinct to look back with fondness for what can never be again?
The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms
In the hush of night while you are in my arms.
I feel you lips so warm and tender,
My one and only love.
Lush and well-crafted words. Romantic poetry. The level of artistry I wanted to reach. Something haunting, beautiful, ineffable in the song and in the solos. Both men masters of their craft. Polished and evocative lyrical and musical statements.
And then there’s:
(Why don’t you come out) to my twist party
(Come out) Where the bright moon shines
(Come out) We’ll dance the night away
I’m gonna make-a you mi-yi-yi-yine
Simplistic twaddle sung in unbelievable falsetto. “I wanna’ dance and make you “mi-yi-yi-yine.” I was so beyond and above that then.
So why is my foot tapping? Why can I still remember those semi-moronic words? Why am I sharing this with my daughter? On the cut, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” I’m singing the lead trumpet part, remembering a tour of Germany with a sextet when we—soldiers all—played that song, so simplistic in its rhyme scheme, but so much fun in its syncopation and brass licks. Downright joyous in a way. And my daughter, for the first time, sees a young musician in her old man.
Okay,
I give myself in sweet surrender…
Sherry, can you come out tonight?

(Paul Paolicelli is the author of Dances with Luigi and Under the Southern Sun)
Now, with permission, here is one critic’s view of Jersey Boys. The critic is our artsjournal.com next-door neighbor Terry Teachout. His review was for The Wall Street Journal.
Seasons Bleatings

YET ANOTHER jukebox musical has come to town, and this time I don’t feel like arguing—much. For reasons not obvious to me, “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons” is not only giving pleasure to paying theatergoers (that part I get) but has also passed muster with certain critics who should know better. Contrary to anything you’ve read elsewhere, it’s nothing more than 32 songs performed on a cheap-looking set by a high-priced lounge band, strung together like dimestore pearls on the most vapid of all-tell-no-show books.
So why is this un-musical selling tickets by the carload? Because, judging by da accents I hoid in da lobby, New Jersey is full of boomers who grew up with such ditties as “Big Girls Do-Hon’t Ka-Rie-Yie-Yie” and are flocking to Broadway to fondle their memories. They clearly don’t care that “Jersey Boys” borders on the plotless: for them, a plot would be a distraction. What they like are the songs, the Joisey jokes and the gangster jokes, not necessarily in that order.
No doubt I’m the wrong person to review this show, seeing as how the hyped-up falsetto yelps of Mr. Valli (convincingly simulated here by John Lloyd Young) give me hi-yie-yives. All I can say is that it would be a lot simpler for everyone involved if they’d just move the whole thing to Newark.
—Terry Teachout